


Making the Best of It

by sith_shenanigans



Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic (Video Game)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-10-27 23:40:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20768864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sith_shenanigans/pseuds/sith_shenanigans
Summary: Collected Ryden'ala vignettes, mostly following the game's plotline.





	Making the Best of It

_11 ATC_  
_The_ Void’s Oath, _Korriban orbit_

Ryden returned to the ship in a giddy daze, barely feeling the weight of the mask in her hands. She set it down on the table, waved Khem away, and somehow made it into the ship’s tiny medbay before she collapsed over one of the beds. She wasn’t injured—she thought she wasn’t injured, anyway. Would she have noticed? Maybe. Maybe not. Other things were so much more important: the thunderhead seeping out through the holes between her ribs, the way she could feel it spreading through her flesh and twisting around her bones.

She pulled her legs up and leaned back against the wall, the short headboard digging into her back. She felt half-delirious and far too exhausted to deal with it—her head was spinning, but all she wanted to do was _sleep_.

She choked down a quiet little laugh-sob and closed her eyes. It didn’t help much; she could still still feel Khreusis’ life unraveling so sharply around her fingers. 

It was more draining than she had let herself realize, to hold herself steady.

Ryden ran her nails along the curves of her arms, pressing down where soft flesh hid muscle. The discomfort was unbearably mild against her bone-deep exhaustion, and it was horribly, horribly tiring to hold herself steady. Her lekku were twisting around each other with the effort of it, of knowing but refusing to look, of feeling but refusing to _see_—

It was a wretched weakness, really, to contain it all inside. She was letting herself shatter apart, bit by bit, and for what? To say that she’d done what she should? That she had tried her best?

She had oh-so-carefully bottled everything up like a good little twi’lek—and she wanted nothing more than to take that bottle and smash it. She was sick of worrying who’d get cut on the shards, she was sick of holding back, and she was so damn sick of _pretending_. 

And that was the real problem, wasn’t it? 

She had tried to convince herself she hated this.

She had tried to convince herself that she’d run if she could. 

(Not yet, though. Just a little bit longer. Just to make sure.)

She had tried so hard.

But it was a lie, and she knew it. She lied and she lied and she lied and it never did her a single lick of good, because—oh, Force help her, she _loved_ being Sith. 

People couldn’t just walk over her anymore. They thought twice before pissing her off. She actually felt powerful for the first time in her life, and the thought of giving that up was, when it came down to it, terrifyingly unpleasant. 

And that was how other Sith—_real_ Sith—thought, wasn’t it? That kind of thinking was responsible for at least half the terrible things that had happened to her, personally, not to mention probably how the Empire had ended up like this in the first place. 

Somehow, knowing that didn’t help much.

Maybe she’d have been strong enough to care, once. But she was so damn tired, and there was a different kind of strength in her now—one that was bitter and selfish and just a little bit broken. 

The girl they’d dumped on Korriban seemed pretty far off, just now. 

But the girl they’d dumped on Korriban could never, ever have survived all this. She’d been the most painfully naïve little acolyte, convinced that she wasn’t _like_ the others. She would hold out. It didn’t matter that generations and generations of good little kids had undoubtedly told themselves the same thing; she would really pull it off. She was different. She was _better_.

A laugh clawed its way out of Ryden’s throat, past the cloying sweetness coating her tongue. 

She’d been so, so convinced she could hold out—and she’d never considered that she might not _want_ to.

What a fool she’d been.


End file.
